The oil industry’s peak body, the Australian Institute of Petroleum, claimed that Australian wholesale petrol prices were at the mercy of the Singapore wholesale market, not the Malaysian Tapis, reported The Sydney Morning Herald (4/9/2007, p.5).

Industry denies collusion: The institute did not return the Herald‘s calls. A spokesperson for BP, however, said the NRMA’s [petrol-price] analysis, based on the Malaysian Tapis index, was “just wrong”. “There is no collusion within the industry,” the spokesperson told AAP. “We don’t just base our pricing on these factors; we base our prices on a range of factors including the price of petrol out of Singapore and local market conditions. The NRMA should be made aware that the industry uses the refined price of petrol out of Singapore as the benchmark for our pricing; we don’t use crude prices.”

ACCC action: The NRMA called on the Federal Government to give the competition commission enhanced powers to regulate the price of petrol, a product the motoring body said should come under the same regulatory framework as other commodities such as water, electricity and gas.